Hot composter!?

Honestly I wouldn't bother - throw everything onto a designated part of the lawn and mow the feck out of it all and sprinkle it on the beds.

Right, so a few months later than planned I finally pulled the trigger on the Joraform 270.
Between the weather being exceptional and the damned expense of the thing I hesitated so much, going between coming up with a DIY solution and just abandoning the concept of a hot composter altogether.

In the end I got tired of not making a decision and just got the damned thing. It's up and running two weeks now and is kicking out heat like the sun.

Initial assembly goes from easy to awkward as you move through the pieces. Toward the end when piecing together the insulated panels is definitely a two muscular person job.

I started chucking kitchen scraps and waste paper and card into it exactly two weeks ago today. I think I made the same mistake as a lot of people and didn't put enough paper/card into it. I.E too much green and not enough brown.
I also chucked in a handful of old compost from the grass pile up the back to help things along.
As a result there were a lot of flies about for the first ten days, however once I started adding wood pellets as recommended the waste started to break down and the heat began to build.
It's now fly free as it's too hot for the buggers to live in and has been getting steadily hotter the past four days, with plenty of steam rising even when the ambient temperature is in the mid twenties.

With the drought still very much in full swing here I am not generating that much garden waste but that will change. The odd few bits from the garden are going in but it's mainly kitchen stuff at the moment.

So now as the main source of my waste is indoors I have a little kitchen caddy from Joseph Joseph that takes fully compostable bags and has a charcoal filter in the lid. So any kitchen waste goes in there with a handful of pellets and card/paper. No smells in the kitchen and now that the composter is up to speed, no smells there either.
The caddy gets emptied into the composter every one or two days when I am heading up to that part of the garden.


To do long term: I tend to generate a fair pile of cardboard waste as I order a lot of stuff online. As part of a push to stop card going to a recycling depot I'd like to have someway to chop this into small pieces and use that in addition to the wood pellets. At the moment I am just tearing pieces off by hand which is tedious of course.


Still can't get over the price of it though!
Hope it helps.
R.

Ah I'm aware of taking a slash into a compost heap being good. I think that in this case though more nitrogens is unneeded. It's getting the carbons in is the problem. Hence the splash of water to make all the card and wood pellets more moist. I might try it though when the missus isn't looking.

Winter update:

I managed to kill off the reaction a while back by chucking way too many dry and wet leaves into it. After a couple of weeks there was no heat. So I stuck a hot water bottle in it for a few hours.
That was enough to kick things off again and it stayed hot from then on in.

Once that load was empty I went back to using it as it should be used and despite the cold the heat built up in it naturally over 5 days.


So we're back to mid 50's inside despite there being a nice layer of frost on the outside.
So still getting a load of compost every 7 weeks or so in Winter!

I think too much about everything in fairness.

The flip side of that is to get the 6-7 week turn over you do have to keep the temp hot. And to do that you can't just sling in any quantity of anything as I've discovered.
The series of previous posts was outlining that learning curve so it might appear that I am spending too much time thinking. I am pretty much done with the learning part so there's next to no thought about what will and won't work at this stage.


On the fall apart thing I think they changed a few things over the years. Not sure have they addressed any of the issues you outlined though. Time will tell whether you were unlucky or whether these things are badly designed/constructed.

Regarding the price issue you are dead right. It's still a sticking point, it's too damn dear. If mine goes I'll be looking to DIY a similar solution. The reason I didn't go DIY this time is that I am stuck for time between work, a young baby and household stuff. You pay for convenience.

I'm having trouble understanding how you used it though when you say you only emptied it once a year. I throw in 4L of kitchen scraps and card, paper and wood chips every day and a half. That weighs about 2Kg each time.
If you were adding 3-4 litres a day how much did the thing weigh after a year? Must have been half a tonne at least after it broke down. Was it the 400L version?